Knowledge that Transforms

Given that many organizations are competitive and finance centered, organizational leaders may lead with a primary focus on bottom-line attainment, such that they are perceived by their subordinates as having a bottom-line mentality (BLM) that entails pursuing bottom-line outcomes above all else. Yet, the field is limited in understanding why such a leadership approach affects employees’ positive and negative contributions in the workplace. Drawing on social exchange theory, we theorize that supervisors high in BLM can influence employees’ felt obligation toward the bottom line, which in turn can influence employees’ task performance and unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB). We also examine employee ambition as a moderator of this process. Using three-wave, multisource data collected from the financial services industry, our results revealed that high-BLM supervisors elevate employee task performance as well as UPB by motivating employees’ felt obligation toward the bottom line. Furthermore, we found that employee ambition served as a first-stage moderator, such that the mediated relationships were stronger when employee ambition was high as opposed to low. Our findings break away from the dominant dysfunctional view of BLM and provide a more balanced view of this mentality.

This article investigates the emergence and development of the innovation platform in a nascent industry, through a dynamic capabilities perspective. Based on an inductive study of the U.K.’s tele-rehabilitation through gaming (TRTG) industry, we identify four capabilities that are important for successful platform development: innovation leverage, market exploration, quality control, and appropriation. A holistic framework is developed to explain how these capabilities can facilitate platform development by enabling appropriate business models and activities. We then discuss how a firm could define and redefine its firm boundary in order to deploy the four capabilities for platform development.

The resource-based view (RBV) makes a significant contribution to strategy by explaining the relationship between resources and firm performance. Particularly in low uncertainty markets, executives have the foresight and time to build strategically valuable resources in current markets and leverage them into related markets. RBV is also relevant for understanding strategies for market entry, extending the value of technology resources, and broadening the locus of resources within ecosystems. Conversely, in high uncertainty markets like nascent or disrupted ones, RBV seems less germane. Resources may not yet exist or their value (and rarity) may be indeterminate (or changing). Here, we contribute the Strategy Creation (SC) view—joining strategizing by doing, thinking, and shaping. It offers a strategic logic that fits highly uncertain markets. Finally, we contribute the insight that RBV and SC are complements under moderate uncertainty, such as growth markets and technology transitions. Overall, we propose that uncertainty forms a crucial boundary condition for RBV that distinguishes between qualitatively different strategic logics.

We start this article with the exploration of similarities between the resource-based view of the firm (RBV) and stakeholder theory at the time of their origination and then proceed with the conversation on what led to distinct developmental trajectories of the two theories. Though RBV has become a leading paradigm in the strategic management field, we argue that in its current form, RBV is yet incomplete. We suggest there are four aspects that stakeholder theory can offer to inform RBV: normativity, sustainability, people, and cooperation. Reconciling stakeholder theory and RBV is a promising path to advancing our understanding of management, and we provide a two-part guideline to management scholars and practitioners who would be willing to take this path.

Replication is an essential part of any science, confirming or adjusting our understanding of the world through repeated exploration of a phenomenon of interest. While there has been an increased interest in the role of replication studies, there also exists skepticism regarding the need for more replication. Our empirical analysis of 406 recent studies that use the term “replication” suggests that this criticism stems from a lack of appreciation of the different forms that replication can take, the prevalence (or lack thereof) of many of these forms, and the objectives that are met by one of the least common forms, constructive replication. As such, the purposes of our paper are (1) to explore the different forms that constructive replication can take and the objectives at which each can be directed, (2) to distinguish these forms from other forms of replication with which they are often confused, (3) to determine how common each form of replication is in our field, and (4) to provide concrete examples of different forms of constructiveness from published studies in order to pave the way towards more (and more useful) replications in the future.

Firms use aspirations to regulate innovative search activities, but peer and historical referents may contain different signals regarding performance feedback. Integrating insights from the literature on profit persistence with the behavioral theory of the firm, we propose a persistence-based framework of organizational innovative search that connects the persistence characteristics of feedback from peer and historical referents with innovative search. We first predict that feedback from peer referents is more persistent than feedback from historical referents. Further, we theorize that peer performance feedback produces more pronounced effects: Performance above (below) peer aspiration leads to less (more) innovative search compared with performance above (below) the historical aspiration level. In addition, because industries impose heterogeneous levels of profit persistence, the differential effect between peer and historical performance feedback on innovative search is likely to be more evident in highly persistent industries. Examining the research-and-development intensity of a comprehensive panel of Compustat manufacturing firms over the past 45 years, our results from quasi–maximum likelihood analysis and fixed-effect panel regression largely support our theoretical development. Our study extends a nascent understanding of aspiration heterogeneity by revealing and empirically confirming the critical role of persistence.

Creating new ventures is one of the most central topics to entrepreneurship and is a critical step from which many theories of management, organizational behavior, and strategic management build. Therefore, this review and proposed research agenda are relevant to not only entrepreneurship scholars but also other management scholars who wish to challenge some of the implicit assumptions of their current streams of research and extend the boundaries of their current theories to earlier in the organization’s life. Given that the last systematic review of the topic was published 16 years ago, and that the topic has evolved rapidly over this time, an overview and research outlook are long overdue. From our review, we inductively generated 10 subtopics: (a) lead founder, (b) founding team, (c) social relationships, (d) cognitions, (e) emergent organizing, (f) new-venture strategy, (g) organizational emergence, (h) new-venture legitimacy, (i) founder exit, and (j) entrepreneurial environment. These subtopics are then organized into three major stages of the entrepreneurial process: co-creating, organizing, and performing. Together, the framework provides a cohesive story of the past and a road map for future research on creating new ventures, focusing on the links connecting these subtopics.

The number of immigrants worldwide has grown rapidly in recent years, and their integration poses challenges, such as cultural and language barriers, for organizations and societies. Securing and maintaining employment is a key challenge for immigrants, yet management research has devoted little attention to migration. We aim to contribute to the emerging literature on this topic by utilizing a multistudy approach with objective and time-lagged field data from 14,327 mail carriers nested in 737 units of a large Swiss logistics firm and an experimental audio vignette study with 262 participants from the United Kingdom. We investigate whether (in)congruence in terms of immigration background between employees and customers is linked to customer complaints. Controlling for service quality, we find that both congruence scenarios (both or neither migrants) are associated with fewer complaints, the latter suggesting that migrants identify with each other despite national and cultural differences. Results from the two incongruence scenarios show increased complaints. In Study 1, we find that units that receive more complaints experience higher rates of voluntary employee withdrawal behaviors (short-term absenteeism and voluntary turnover), highlighting how unfair customer complaints can hurt organizations twice, by increasing the risk of loss in both customers and employees. In Study 2, we replicate the immigrant identity effect at the individual level and find that social attraction mediates the (in)congruence–complaints link.

After reviewing the various ways employee recovery from work has been conceptualized in existing literature as well as the predominant theoretical frameworks used to study recovery, we meta-analyze the relationships between employee recovery, demands, resources, well-being, and performance. We also quantitatively examine the conceptualizations of recovery as activities, experiences, or states in terms of both their intercorrelations and differing effects with demands, resources, well-being, and performance. Results of meta-analyses using a total of 198 empirical samples indicated general support for the hypothesized positive relationships between employee recovery and resources, well-being, and performance as well as a negative relationship with demands. However, the size and consistency of observed effects differed markedly based on the conceptualization utilized. Additionally, various conceptualizations of recovery were shown to be only modestly related, while recovery experiences and the state of being recovered were shown to have substantial temporal consistency. Implications of these findings for scholars studying recovery and practitioners are discussed.

Organizational adaptation is equivocal. On the one hand, the concept is ubiquitous in management research and acts as the glue binding together the central issues of organizational change, performance, and survival. On the other hand, it lurks around in various guises (e.g., "fit," "alignment," "congruence," and "strategic change") studied from multiple theoretical streams (e.g., behavioral, resource based, and institutional) and at different levels of analysis (e.g., organization and industry levels). In a novel approach to reviewing 443 adaptation articles that leverages both computational and hand-coded analysis, we produce an interactive visual of the themes most studied by adaptation scholars. We inductively draw out a definition of adaptation as intentional decision making undertaken by organizational members, leading to observable actions that aim to reduce the distance between an organization and its economic and institutional environments. We then review the literature across three main areas of inquiry and six theoretical perspectives that surfaced from our analysis and identify 11 difficulties that have hampered adaptation research in the past 50 years. Our review suggests ways to address these difficulties to enable future research to develop and cumulate.